It’s official: we have raised at least one generation so privileged
and self-centered that it makes demands on life instead of the other way
around.
The New York Times
reported
recently on the rise of university student requests for “trigger warnings,”
alerts from the professor that the syllabus material students may encounter in
the course might deeply disturb them – re-traumatizing, for example, rape
victims or war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The student government at the University of California,
Santa Barbara (UCSB) formally called for trigger warnings, and similar requests
have been made at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of
Michigan, and George Washington University, among others.
In a Rutgers newspaper editorial,
for example, a student explained that trigger warnings are necessary for professors
“to create a safe space for their students.” As examples, he cited Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which
addresses suicide, and hyperbolically describes “scenes that reference gory,
abusive and misogynistic violence” in The
Great Gatsby.
UCSB sophomore Bailey Loverin has a slightly more legitimate
complaint. Loverin is one of the students who requested trigger warnings. A
victim herself of sexual abuse, she approached a professor after he showed a
film depicting rape, and suggested that he should warn students. I don’t know
how graphic that film was, but I could concede that if professors are dealing
in course material that really is graphic, then a general warning to that
effect is appropriate.
For example, Lisa Hajjar, a UCSB sociology professor, uses
graphic depictions of torture in her courses about war. I could accept the
argument that students should know what they are in for if they take the class.
But Hajjar complains that
Any kind of blanket trigger policy
is inimical to academic freedom. Any student can request some sort of
individual accommodation, but to say we need some kind of one-size-fits-all
approach is totally wrong. The presumption there is that students should not be
forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even
dangerous.
Speaking of absurd, a draft guide for trigger warnings circulated
at Oberlin College is laughable in the extent of its catalog of topics
considered disturbing. It urged professors to “be aware of racism, classism,
sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and
oppression.” I’m not sure there is any work of art that would make the cut in
that list. “Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic,” the guide
continues, “and that your students have lives before and outside your
classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” I think the writer of
that guide should realize that it is condescending, and that students need to
get over themselves and understand that the world, including a college classroom,
doesn’t owe them any sensitivity to their personal circumstances, so they need
to handle it or get help.
“Frankly,” says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education, “it seems this is sort of an inevitable
movement toward people increasingly expecting physical comfort and intellectual
comfort in their lives. It is only going to get harder to teach people that
there is a real important and serious value to being offended. Part of that is
talking about deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects.”
Rebecca Joines Shinsky at Book
Riot takes a dim view of editorials (like mine) that complain about trigger
warnings, which she favors because “people matter more” than books. She admits
that “I’m not an educator, and I’m not here to make a declaration about how
schools should address students’ concerns about triggering content,” but that
“there is no scene in literature that is so important that reading it should
supercede a reader’s psychological health.”
Jenny Jarvie at The New Republic disagrees:
Structuring public life around the
most fragile personal sensitivities will only restrict all of our
horizons. Engaging with ideas involves risk, and slapping warnings on them
only undermines the principle of intellectual exploration. We cannot anticipate
every potential trigger—the world, like the Internet, is too large and
unwieldy. But even if we could, why would we want to? Bending the world to
accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them.
I couldn’t agree more with Ms. Jarvie. This is not to diminish anyone’s legitimate personal trauma, but if a college student is so sensitive that he or she is incapable of reading something as innocuous as The Great Gatsby or the anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice without suffering a psychological setback, then that student is in for a rude awakening about the real world. Institutions of higher learning exist, at least in theory, to open up students to the world, not to guarantee them safe passage through it.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/3/14)
